Sydney Harris & Sarah Buckner Paving the Way for Female Officials at Predators Rookie Showcase

As the officials for Game One of the Nashville Predators Rookie Showcase skated out onto the playing surface at Ford Ice Center Bellevue on Friday, two bands of purple breaking through the usual grid of black and white stripes immediately caught the eye.

The official color of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, the unique hue belonged to Sydney Harris, one of two female officials helping call this weekend’s showcase.

For Harris, who has already worked games at the PWHL and IIHF U18 level, the chance to work an NHL-caliber event was almost too good to be true.

“I couldn’t even sleep last night,” Harris said before the game. “It was crazy.”

Opportunities like Harris' are becoming more and more common. As interest in the player’s side of hockey has grown among women over the years, so too has the interest in officiating.

That interest has been given the attention it deserves.

“We feel it's very important for the inclusion and the development of female officials within the game, so we've been using female officials in NHL rookie tournaments for the past four years now,” NHL Director of Scouting and Development Al Kimmel said. “It's an opportunity for us to identify up-and-coming female officials from across North America and submerse them into a professional atmosphere, to give them a sense of the intensity and the caliber of play and to evaluate their skills and potentially use them throughout the season in the American Hockey League or other amateur leagues across North America.”

This weekend, NHL rookie tournaments spanning the continent - from Penticton, B.C. to Buffalo, N.Y. - will indeed feature at least one female official.

In Nashville, there are two.

Joining Harris on the ice is Sarah Buckner, a legend of the black and white stripes among up-and-coming officiating circles.

“She is one of the coolest people ever, but I have never actually got to spend a large amount of time with her,” Harris said. “It's all just word of mouth. I had just finished playing, and Buckner was already sort of in the middle of officiating, like she was on some high level IIHF stuff. She was one of those officials that when you're going to all those camps to get your license, you hear about. She's very good at what she does.”

A former player, Buckner finished her distinguished collegiate career at Minneapolis, Minnesota’s Augsburg College - now Augsburg University - in 2016.

The Duluth, Minnesota, native had many ideas for what she might do next. Officiating was not one of them.

“Honestly, I got into it because my best friend was going to start officiating,” Buckner said. “I had really zero desire to officiate prior to that, but my best friend, her dad and older brothers had been officials at the local level back in Minnesota for a long time. I only worked adult hockey that first winter, an adult women's league in Minnesota. I worked 22 games that first winter season, so I was still playing as well. But it turned out that I enjoyed officiating, and I was relatively good at it.”

From there, one opportunity tumbled into the next. Buckner went from officiating youth to high school hockey, then college to pro. Her new path, which brought her to the 2023 and 2024 IIHF Women’s World Championships, eventually brought her back home to the State of Hockey, where another opportunity arose with the PWHL.

Buckner, who’d officiated for the Premier Hockey Federation and the National Women’s Hockey League before their disbandment, noted that while the leagues had turned over, the significance of the opportunity hadn’t.

“It's the same kind of feeling, just being grateful to get to officiate at the highest level with the best players in the world,” she said. “And it was really cool to be able to do it in my home state, the State of Hockey. I was just really happy with how the fans showed out, and especially for the first game. It was really cool getting to be a part of that.”

Of course, Buckner and Harris’ paths to the Music City this weekend are not dissimilar.

A defender for Elmira College, Harris finished her collegiate career with the Soaring Eagles in 2022. From there, the Pueblo, Colorado, native just wanted to stay involved in the game any way she could.

Officiating became a natural next step.

“Everybody wants to stay involved in the game,” Harris said. “I found that officiating was the closest thing to getting to play that there was. No game is ever the same. It's always a different challenge. You're experiencing a different scenario every single time you get on the ice, and you're always looking to get better.”

The League is eager to help young officials get better, too, and has developed many resources over the years to do so. None offer quite the same valuable experience as the NHL Officiating Exposure Combine, which Harris herself attended not long ago.

“We try to focus on ex-players and people without any experience at all and bring them to Buffalo, and just kind of gently submerge them into officiating culture, show them what's involved, show them that it's similar to playing,” Kimmel said. “There's team camaraderie and competition and new challenges to try and keep them involved in the game. That's been very successful… It's an opportunity to bring people together from different officiating cultures and backgrounds, and kind of blend them together and try to get them the best resources.”

“It was a very cool experience for me,” Harris said. “All of a sudden, all these doors had opened that I didn't even know were doors that I could walk through. And now I’m just waiting to see what that entails for me. I'm going to jump at every opportunity that I got there.”

For female officials, the opportunities are quickly becoming limitless.

Ever since Katie Guay smashed through the glass ceiling three years ago as the first woman to officiate an American Hockey League game, the number of female referees and linespeople working in established North American leagues has grown exponentially.

“Since we included female officials in the American Hockey League staff, other leagues have followed suit,” Kimmel said. “From the Ontario Hockey League to the Western Hockey League, the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League to the United States Hockey League and North American Hockey League - it's opened doors and given women an opportunity to compete with their male colleagues across North America and show people that at the end of the day, officials are just officials, no matter what gender. If they're capable of doing the job, then they should be given that opportunity.”

While the NHL has not yet seen a female official during regular season action, opportunities like this weekend’s rookie showcases are helping make that milestone a matter of when, and not if.

“It’s like the quest to break the four minute mile,” Harris said. “Everybody thought it was impossible. And then when Roger Bannister did it for the first time, it was like an explosion. Two weeks later, somebody else broke the four minute mile, and then two weeks after that, somebody else broke it. It was all about the perception that it was possible and not the idea that it wasn't actually possible.”

“Everything seems more possible when you can see somebody else doing it,” Buckner said. “Maybe you just hadn’t thought about it before. It’s like, ‘Oh, they’re doing it, so maybe I can do that too.’”

Whether they know it or not, this weekend Harris and Buckner are contributing far more to their sport than calling penalties and offsides. After all, as those purple streaks fly up and down the ice, it’s easy to imagine - if not highly probable - that a pair of eager, young eyes could be paying close attention from the stands.

“I think that's the ultimate goal behind it, is to show young girls and young women that there is a place for them in this sport, even if it's not playing,” Harris said. “To use the PWHL phrase, if glass ceilings can be shattered, then somebody should do it so other people know they can too.”

The 2024 NHL Rookie Showcase presented by Ticketmaster features competition between the Predators, Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers and Carolina Hurricanes prospect squad concludes Monday, Sept. 16 at Ford Ice Center Bellevue.

Click here to get tickets or follow the action live at NashvillePredators.com/Livestream.